DHURJATI PRASAD MUKERJI
Methodology of his work
D. P. Mukerji was perhaps the most popular of the pioneers in Indian sociology. Like all of them, he resisted any attempt at the compartmentalization of knowledge in social science. He came to sociology more as a social philosopher. However, he ended up more as an advocate of empiricism, involving spiritual feelings.
He was deeply interested in understanding the nature and meaning of Indian social reality rooted in the Indian tradition. He was equally interested in finding out the ways of how to change it for promoting welfare of the common people by adapting the forces of modernity to the specificity of Indian tradition.
DP contributed the perspective of Marxian sociology in India. He was tolerant of western ideas, concepts and analytical categories. He viewed that there is a need for an indigenous sociology and social anthropology, but he certainly did not want to insulate these disciplines in India from the western social traditions.
Dialectics of tradition and modernity
Tradition
The English word "tradition" comes from the Latin traditio, the noun from the verb traderere or tradere (to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping); it was originally used in Roman law to refer to the concept of legal transfers and inheritance.
Modernity
There have been numerous attempts, particularly in the field of sociology, to understand what modernity is. Modernity is often characterized by comparing modern societies to premodern or postmodern ones, and the understanding of those non-modern social statuses is, again, far from a settled issue. To an extent, it is reasonable to doubt the very possibility of a descriptive concept that can adequately capture diverse realities of societies of various historical contexts, especially non-European ones, let alone a three stage model of social evolution from premodernity to postmodernity.
Dialectics of Tradition and Modernity:
The strength of the Indian tradition lies in its crystallization of values emerging from past happenings in the life-habits and emotions of men and women. In this way, India has certainly conserved many values: some good and others bad.
He is convinced that adjustments will certainly occur. It is almost guaranteed that Indians will not vanish, as primitive tribes have done, at the touch of western culture. They have sufficient flexibility for that. Indian culture had assimilated tribal culture and many of its endogenous dissents. It had developed Hindu-Muslim cultures and modern Indian culture is a curious blending, varansankara. “Traditionally, therefore, living in adjustment is in India’s blood, so to speak”.
D.P. Mukerji does not worship tradition. His idea of “complete man” or “well-balanced personality” calls for a blend of
moral fervour and aesthetic and intellectual sensibility with
the sense of history and rationality.
The qualities of the second category are emphasized more by modernity, than by the Indian tradition. Hence, the dialectics between tradition and modernity herein lies in the need for understanding the tradition.
The encounter between tradition and modernity, therefore, ends up in two consequences:
conflict, and
synthesis.
Indian society, as D.P. Mukerji envisages, is the result of the interaction between tradition and modernity. It is this dialectics, which helps us to analyse the Indian society.
Composition of Traditions
DP tried to provide a classification of Indian traditions under three heads, viz., and primary, secondary and tertiary. The primary traditions have been primordial and authentic to Indian society. The secondary traditions were given second ranking, when the Muslims arrived in the country. And, by the time of the British arrival, Hindus and Muslims had yet not achieved a full synthesis of traditions at all levels of existence. In the tertiary traditions of conceptual thought, however, differences survived prominently.
Sources of Traditions
The major sources of traditions are Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and western culture, but what traditions, for instance, of Hinduism or Islam constitute the broader Indian traditions have not been made specific by D.P. Mukerji.
His weakness in this respect has been identified by T.N. Madan who says that the general make up of Indian traditions according to D.P. Mukerji could be a synthesis of Vedanta, western liberation and Marxism. But, what about the synthesis of Islam and Buddhism? He fails to provide any such synthesis of other major traditions.
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